Online Search Behavior

Ask a potential customer of yours what they do each day on the internet and you are likely to get a variety of answers. Many of us check our e-mail or news headlines, but an answer that is becoming more and more common to hear is that the customer is simply searching on the web.

According to a recent study by Pew Internet & American Life Project 49 percent of US Internet Users are conducting daily Online Searches.

That’s almost half of U.S. Internet Users searching online daily. Are they finding you? How are they finding you?

Pick your favorite search engine and do a search for the name of your property. What do you see? Does your main website shows up in both the local results and the main organic results? That’s step one. But these consumers already knew you as they searched for you by name.

Now think about all those other factors that impact your business. Are you near a theme park or University? Do you have the best wedding facility in town? This is the business you really want to capture. The people who know you by name will find you. Finding the consumers who don’t know you, but are searching for things in your market, can open up a new revenue stream. The challenge with capturing searches for these things is determining what those consumers are actually typing into the search engine. A great free tool to use for preliminary research is http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/.

Getting those consumers who are doing general searches to find your website is a great first goal. Once you’ve captured them, your focus should shift to converting them. We will focus on conversion factors in our next newsletter.